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Ad Blocking Is Here to Stay
This has been discussed at some length before, but with yet another one of my favorite websites featuring a columnist adding their voice to the fracas, I thought it was worth revisiting. Like Ars Technica before him, Louis Lazaris of Smashing Magazine chastises folks who aren’t keen on including ads in their web browsing experience,…
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Missing the Mark
Slowly, ever so slowly, some of the clear thinking with respect to filesharing and intellectual monopoly (imaginary property, if you will) is filtering into more mainstream channels. I was rather pleased to see these two pieces by Joe Konrath and David Gerrold; both say some excellent things before veering off into the content industry’s Bizarro…
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This Should Never Happen
I just read a news post from Tim at CAD-Comic: Apparently, he searched the web for outfit ideas when creating a new character, and inadvertently based one off of some other artist’s painting. Since then it sounds like somebody came after him for “infringement,” and he’s gone back and changed every comic containing the artwork.…
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Missing the Point of the GPL
Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design seems like a swell chap, but his recent post on applying the GPL to premium WordPress themes exemplifies the kind of erroneous thinking I frequently find in the creative community. In trying to apply scarcity rules to infinite goods, he misses out on an opportunity to utilize, rather than…
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Our Collective Ophitoxaemia
Even as content industries, patent trolls, and cretins shamelessly abuse their monopoly privileges, some of their behavior filters down to creators with even less to gain from such behavior. The false concepts of idea “ownership” and permission culture are a flesh-melting venom chewing away at our creative body. One of the most egregious examples is…
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iShenanigans
There’s been quite the foofaraw surrounding the leak of the latest iPhone prototype (Spoiler: one of the employees left it at a bar, a guy found it, Gizmodo bought it from him and posted a teardown). It’s the expected incremental upgrade scheduled for release this summer that continues the process of making the iPhone more…
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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property
Despite the attempts to elevate it to something tantamount to actual items, so-called “intellectual property” occupies the Land of Make-Believe along with unicorns and elves. Yet the very suggestion that the monopoly privileges associated with IP are invalid raises hackles and provokes fervent responses from the faithful. Jack Valenti brilliantly set the course during his…
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The Corporate Sense of Entitlement
IP apologists like to say that people such as myself who don’t like seeing ads, installing malware on our computers, or paying for copies of an infinite good have a “sense of entitlement” to content. As you might have guessed, I think this is hogwash. Corporations and content creators have gotten used to controlling the…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.